Episode 162: Not Growing? The Top 5 Excuses Cleaning Business Owners Use (And Why They’re BS)

Episode 162: Not Growing? The Top 5 Excuses Cleaning Business Owners Use (And Why They’re BS)

Brandon Schoen:
Believe it or not, people are still running their businesses on a piece of pen and paper and they're like, overwhelmed and they're like, I can't keep up. Things are falling through the cracks. The schedule's on Google Calendar or some Calendar and it's all over the place. You need a system, guys. You need a structure to do all this stuff and everything that was just mentioned there. Customer info, scheduling, invoicing. That's a CRM. That's a great system.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners Podcast with your hosts, Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners Podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win.

Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you for the opportunity to be helping you grow your cleaning businesses. I am your host, Brandon Shane, and I'm joined by my awesome co host Brandon Conrey in the house. What's going on, Brandon? Another day, another, another recording. Another recording. Running the cleaning business. We just finished a awesome coaching call today with all the students. It was really, really awesome. And we're talking about preparing for success in 2025.

So if you guys aren't on the ship, get on the ship. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you haven't joined, get on on those calls with us. You know, book a call. We'll tell you how to do that here at the end. But we're going to jump into this episode, guys. This is the top five, five excuses cleaning business owners use to keep themselves from growing.

Very, very common excuses we hear. And in fact, we're on these calls every week, you know, 20 hours plus a week, talking to you guys, coaching you guys, listening to the issues you're struggling through. We're all struggling with the same issues, essentially, but we wanted to just recap some of the top issues, excuses, challenges, whatever you want to call them that people are experiencing, experiencing and growing the cleaning business.

I think excuses is the wrong word because, like, that makes it sound like I'm not gonna do it because of this. But in reality, all. All the stuff that we're gonna go through today, these were all from people like you that listened to the podcast and then they ended up, you know, joining the masterclass, which we'll give you details on later. And so these were things that we could help them with.

So instead of excuses, let's call em like challenges, like These are just issues that Early Stage Cleaning Company, maybe even Early Stage, is just the wrong one. A lot of cleaning company owners, you get started, things go great, and then you plateau. We got to a point where we did XYZ and then it got great, and then we couldn't figure out how to move beyond that. So that.

That's kind of what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about plateauing and how to overcome those problems. Yeah, absolutely. That's a much better way to say it. And we're probably going to talk about more than five guys, but it's just a good headline. You know, we're good at marketing stuff, so might as well just give you the top five here. But if you guys.

First of all, if you guys are getting value out of the show, we normally ask you guys to do this at the end, but I'm just gonna say at the beginning, we don't charge money for these podcasts. We're not charging. We're not putting a bunch of annoying ads for 10 minutes on the beginning of these and stuff. So please help us out, share the show if you guys are getting value, if we're inspiring you, helping you, you know, be inspired to take some new action.

If you. Maybe we've made you laugh, made you cry, hopefully not cry too hard, but share the show, leave us a review and help us out here and so we can spread the movement, help more people and, you know, entrepreneurs are going to change the world. So the more people we reach, the more we can change the world and we can all win together. So please do that and let's get into it, Brandon.

So let's break down. We're going to go through challenges, growth challenges, operational challenges, training challenges, marketing acquisition. There's a bunch of different categories of these challenges that we hear on these calls, but those are kind of like what we have lumped them into. And we're. They. These are actually students that we're working with currently. These. We went back to some calls that we had and just took out the challenges they were having, right?

The issues they were experiencing. And like Brandon said, when you're growing a business, you. It's kind of like these cycles you go on, right? So you, like, have a bunch of growth, everything's going good, and then you hit a plateau, and then you're like, oh, no, we need to revamp and retool and get new resources, and then you go on another growth spurt. And so it's never const.

It's never like the same. Right. But you're. As you're growing, you're going to have these different breaking points and you're going to have different resources, different knowledge. You're going to need to grow past that point. I think we're at a breaking point right now in our business and retooling stuff and figuring that out too. So it's a journey, right? You guys are constantly on the journey, never arrive.

We're just going to keep going. So let's dive into it, Brandon. Let's start going through these challenges and talk through. Yeah. So, you know, one student suggested that they needed a better. They need better systems to manage customers and information and scheduling and invoicing. They want to automate some processes to step back from the day to day operations. I think that's what we do better than most companies is just Brandon and I don't live in Albuquerque where the cleaning company is anymore.

We kind of run things remotely. So I think that's why a lot of people reach out to us, is there's a way to do it. And you know, like in general, this person's goal is to grow the residential cleaning side of the business and they want to implement new training systems and marketing strategies. So I think that's pretty common. That's pretty common scenario right there, like top to bottom, that, that there's a lot of stuff in there.

Like you could spend a whole time focusing just on increasing marketing. You could spend a whole lot of time on just increasing training. There's a lot going on in that particular case. Yeah, there definitely is. But I think let's just start with the first one, which is Better systems to manage customer info, scheduling, invoicing. That is what we call a CRM. It's a piece of software. What does that stand for, Brandon?

Customer Relationship. Customer Relationship Manager. Yeah, there you go. So believe it or not, people are still running their businesses on a piece of pen and paper and they're like doing. They're like overwhelmed and they're like, I. I can't keep up. Things are falling through the cracks. The schedules on Google Calendar or some Calendar, and it's all over the place. You need a system, guys. You need a structure to do all this stuff and everything that was just mentioned there.

Customer info, scheduling, invoicing. That's a CRM. That's a great system, right? Yep. There are lots of them out there. We use one called Service Fusion. There's one called Housecall Pro. There's Jobber we were just talking about in that coaching Call today how we're going to try and set up a podcast series maybe so don't hold me to it, but where we get, we're going to record demos for all these CRMs that people are using and then try and whittle down what the best use case is for each one for you guys.

So stay tuned for that info in the future. Yeah, absolutely. That's gonna be really fun. And you know, the other part of this was desire to automate processes. Step back from the day to day operations. This is the whole reason you guys got into business was not to create another job for yourself, right? Was to create a business that will run without you like a well oiled machine.

And this is what we've done with our business and this is what we're trying to help you guys do on this podcast and in our coaching and whatnot. So you don't wanna automate everything, but you do wanna automate the things that you can automate that make your business more streamlined. And again, this comes down to, you know, potential systems within hiring, within training, within creating the customer experience.

Right. So there's a lot of kind of like day to day things that you can automate. But I do think automate's the wrong word because it makes it sound like there's a software program or an AI bot in the background doing stuff for you. I don't think that's what we really mean in this sense. What we mean is, uh, delegate. Just so you don't have to do it.

It's gonna be automated. It's just that you're not. Someone's gonna do it, like the human is gonna do it. So how have we done that? In our cleaning company we hired people to do stuff that we don't want to do. So there's a customer experience team. We used to have one person, it was me and then we had one other person and then that didn't work. And then we went to a team model and now we have the customer experience manager and three full time reps on top of the manager and then a part time rep.

So there's three and a half full time reps and then a manager that manages those people. So does that count as automation? I think it does. I'm not taking customer calls anymore. It's just that we're paying someone else to do it and we've set up the compensation to cover that. Like, I mean you have to pay them. They're not, it's not a machine like that. You pay 10 bucks a month.

To do it. Like these are people with lives and kids and houses and stuff. But the point is, it's not on our table, it's not on our plate directly anymore. Yeah, exactly. And I guess, yeah, that word is a tricky word, automate. But you also want to be careful with automation because that's like a big buzzword these days. Everyone's trying to automate everything. And to the point where even like the contractor model, we've talked about that a lot, you're putting pricing on the website, you're letting people schedule their own stuff.

We don't do that because it's so much automation that you're taking out the human element and the human customer experience. Personal touch is huge, guys. So, you know the parts where you can connect, build that relationship and rapport with your customers, do those things, take the inefficient time that it takes to do those things, to build that trust, to build that. Those connections and then anything else that you can do in the business, to automate, that's what you want to automate, is those pieces.

Maybe it's a software, maybe it's a system that you just repeat, rinse and repeat. Right. That's kind of what we're talking about there. I don't like the set it and forget it type of automation because it could be running awry and you don't know about it because you did the forget part. Like, you do need to. We prefer the statement like trust but verify. So, like, we hired this rep to do this thing.

We now have weekly sales training with those reps where all of us are in it, Brandon and myself included. And we're always honing those skills. Like you're never done learning. We don't want the reps to think that they're done. Like, you can always improve. And we're just trying to teach that into them over time. And that is part of the delegation, part of it. But don't, don't get it to the point where we did it and now we're never going to think about sales again because there's a phone tree that asks them if they want to do sales, go to the website and fill out this thing.

Like, your conversion rate's going to be terrible doing that. Yeah. And the same goes with the cleaning, right? Like, if you're like, hey, we hired people that know how to clean, or we taught them how to do it one time in person or a couple days in training, like, maybe, but you should also go back and revisit how can we get better what are the complaints we had last week?

What can we do to improve? And with practice and repetition you get great. So that's why we're constantly doing training, new trainings like every week. The team, the teams are meeting on those exact issues. What do we do great? What can we improve on? Let's go back through the training a little bit on those issues. So it's never done. It's a constant process of improvement. So I think we kind of hammered that one pretty well.

Let's jump to the next one. Brandon. So another student we were talking to growth, challenges and goals. They were hesitant to expand due to fears about managing growth, hiring and payroll. I think that's a pretty common one. It's scary running a business. First of all, it's one of the hardest things you'll ever do ever. But yeah, expanding and fearful of managing growth, hiring and payroll. I hear this one a lot.

People are like, how do I hire? It's like the chicken or egg situation. How do I hire people? If I don't have enough clients, I'm like scared to grow. Cause then I have to actually pay people and bring people from maybe contractors, the W2, and then do payroll and I have more expenses and that sounds scary. And how am I going to pay myself? Right, so let's talk through that one.

Brandon, what would we recommend on that? I mean, just cut the cord and do it, man. Like in the end, like if you're going to live with the fear of being a better business, this is like actually one of the best problems to have is I'm hesitant to expand. That means that in your brain it's totally possible I could expand tomorrow. I just don't want to do it because it's going to be a lot of work or I'm scared of that work.

This is, this is one of the stepping stones along the way. Like you get to the point. When we started, we had one team. It was a grind to get that one team filled out. And then we expanded to two. And then all the cleaners hated us because we had three full time cleaners with full time hours. And then we had six cleaners all working 20 hours a week.

But then we had to backfill with sales. That put the pressure on us to get more customers, to get more hours. And then now we're up to 17s I think. And expanding is a lot easier. So like the bigger you get, the easier it is to become even bigger. It takes money to make money. Maybe like something along those lines. So how do you Overcome this in my mind, like, just don't be afraid of the success.

Like, you've done something, it's awesome. But now we have to. You accomplished the goal. You got the cleaning company, money's coming in, you're maxed out. If you stop there, kind of like, what's the point? In my mind, like, if the point was to generate a job for yourself, then cool, then you did it. And there's. You wouldn't be talking to us about expansion anyway. So the only reason you're talking to us is that you do want to expand.

It's just that you don't know how to do it. Exactly. And what our CFO always tells us. I don't know. I'm sure other success gurus have said this before, but sales cures. All right, so if you're like, I'm scared to expand because if I hire someone or, you know, then I. Then I have to get more customers. I don't have enough people, or that's how I'm paying myself right now.

What am I going to do? Well, first of all, if you're fearful of it, this is what we've already always learned is if it's scary and you're like, oh, my gosh, I don't know about doing this, move towards it. Like, the faster you move towards your fear, the faster you realize it's just an illusion. It's not real anyways. And it's actually, like, you'll do it and you'll be like, wow, that wasn't so hard.

I was scared to hire a new team. I was scared to hire people. We did it. Now everything's working better. Now I'm actually motivated. Like, it'll put your back against the wall. It's true. It'll, like, you hire people and now you gotta go find more customers. But that's a good thing. Those new customers will come in and solve all the issues. That's revenue to pay your people. That's revenue to pay yourself.

That's revenue to keep growing. Right? So just continue to focus on what's gonna move the needle forward. What are the needle moving tasks? Taking yourself out of the business, out of the cleaning, especially in the beginning, that's gonna help you focus on those other things. So you know that's exactly what you need to be doing. Get out of the normal stuff, you know, and grow the business. You have to go through some uncomfortable parts to move to the better stuff beyond.

So do the fear thing. Get it over with. And then you'll realize that there's more stuff to do on the other side of the wall and just keep going. Exactly. And so, you know, just a little further on. This student actually wanted help with more business, business operations, financial scaling strategies. When you guys are scaling your business, you have to think like you're driving a race car. And if you just drive it and hit the gas really hard without having everything glued in and locked in place and have structure, the doors are structured in, the engine has all the different structures in it.

If you just hit the gas and go, you're going to fall apart, the doors are going to fly off, the wheels are going to fly off. So when you're scaling, remove the variables, remove all the things that could go wrong, and then you can go faster without those issues happening. So that's why in the beginning it's super critical to build these systems out, do the hard work, put a CRM in place, put a training system in place, put a, you know, a financial system in place.

All these things that are gonna help you guys so you can operate at a faster speed of excellence and actually hit your goals versus just like puttering out and burning out and the doors flying off. And now we gotta get out and fix it. And that's inefficient. Right? So that's why, you know, spend the hard work and time up front to do the hard work so that you can automate later so you can remove yourself and then all those other strategies get easier.

So, all right, I think this is the same student, but there are some operational challenges. Scheduling inefficiencies due to spread out locations, customer preferences. That's a big one, right? Something that happens in the beginning. But we, you work through it over time, right, Brandon? Yeah. So in the beginning you have one team, you have a designated area, maybe it's huge. Like Albuquerque is a pretty big metro area, distance wise, like ground to cover.

And yeah, you're going to be inefficient in the beginning. But the key, there's some finesse that you can work on your schedule. Like, we've got people in this neighborhood on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Can we talk to them and just see if they could all do it on Monday or all on Wednesday? Not everyone's going to say yes to that, but there's a way to do it. But the real magic on the scheduling is when you're able to get another team.

When you go from one to two teams. Cool. You guys cover this half of the city on Monday and you cover this half and then you could move around and as you get bigger, the teams are districted. So you keep this team in this area for this amount of time. And then the idea is we're going to reduce drive time. So like in the beginning when we had one team, we had drives up to 45 minutes long in some cases and we want to get it down to like five to 10 minutes in between jobs.

So we're not paying three people to drive around, which is very inefficient. But it's also necessary. We have to get from point A to point B. There's no way around it. So that's just a little bit of schedule finesse. Yeah, exactly. And like we said, it's gets easier as you guys create the momentum. We always talk about this business like a steam locomotive. It's like chug, chug. And then it just goes chug and just starts taking off and it takes on this well oiled machine like life of its own, which is what you want to get to.

But before you get to that, it is, it is more inconsistent. It's harder with those first teams. But as you get more people, it gets even easier because now you have more people to work with. It's easier to break off a new team or you know, maybe move people around if they're not working out together. So the, I think the startup issues you'll have get far easier as you guys get through that.

That first, you know, part of the business that's the hardest part is the startup first team or two getting things going. Everything's new, everything feels like you're fearful of doing this or that. Cause you don't know yet. But once you start doing it right, or if you're modeling success, taking the knowledge we're giving you guys on the podcast and the coaching, you will compress that time of making your own mistakes.

And that's why we offer, you know, all this knowledge that we're putting out there is to help you guys compress that time. So that's a good one. Also on that was reliance on in person estimates, which is time consuming. Maybe this is a good way to. But we don't do that. I think it is. Yeah, we were the same way. When you're brand new, no reviews, no one knows you totally, you're gonna.

I had a polo with our logo engraved on it or embroidered rather. And we went out, I looked people in the eye, shook hands with people, checked out their house, answered questions. And what that was doing really was giving me a data library of what customers wanted to know. Are people Background checked. Is it the same people every time? Do I have to give them a key? Can I just give them a door code?

Like all the questions that are gonna influence your local market, you're gonna find out from those in person ones. But the idea should be to get away from the in person estimate, but not replacing it with online booking where they get the pricing without talking to you. You just want to call them on the phone. We had a middle of the road step from in person estimates to phone estimates, which was Covid.

And we did estimates by force, essentially over zoom. And we learned some stuff there too. So you can do video call estimates where they walk you around the house with a phone that like tripled capacity. Cause on a, on a fully booked day, I could do between six and eight estimates, depending on how far apart they were. With COVID and Zoom calls and stuff, you could do like 20 because they were just back to, back to back meetings.

And ultimately we got away from that and we did the phone. And so we've trained the reps what to ask to try and reveal if those customers are going to be a problem. When was the last time you had your house cleaned? Have you ever had it professionally cleaned before? On a scale of 1 to 10, how dirty would you say the house is? Like, you can come up with creative ways to ask them these questions.

You just don't want to walk into like a hoarder house situation or something that you thought was going to be really easy and it's really bad. So there's ways to do it. But I do think you want to start in person and then work your way out of that system. Yeah. And another thing the teams do as well is just if there's questionable client and we're like, I don't know, it might be a bad situation.

Hey, would you mind sending us a picture of the bathroom or the kitchen you said was kind of a little messier than normal just so you can take a look. Just so if we need to add some extra time to the clean, you know, we can make sure that we've got you covered there and no worries, Brandon, we'll keep going. But yeah, that's another way to do it.

And I think those automations of, they're not really automations, but just automating more of that process so you're not driving all over town. I think it's very, very valuable to do that in the beginning to build those initial customer relationships. But then after that, once you've built trust, you have lots of reviews, you Know what the customer, who the ideal customers are, what you need to be asking, then it's okay to, you know, move to the phone or something else more efficient.

And you can, you can delegate that process to your team. Cause you've done it yourself, you understand the pain points, what the customer needs. Now you can delegate that and have still an efficient process and get it done far smoother. Right. So, all right, cool. And then training and quality control. This is actually the same student. So current system still relies heavily on them for training that. We hear this all the time too.

No formal documented training process. Quality checks performed by the lead cleaner. But vulnerable if the lead leaps. Right. So again, a lot of times I'll hear these stories on the, on the calls. We're like, I'm in person training, I'm doing everything. Or I have a team lead that they're great, we're so lucky to have them and they train our team. But it's like, if that person left or, or something happened to you or that person tomorrow, what would happen in your business?

And also could somebody walk into your business and start learning how to train, you know, clean and train and then train your teams. That's kind of how you need to be, start thinking in all the different parts of your business. But specifically with the cleaning, if everything relies on you for the cleaning, for the training, for the inspections, for. Well, then you don't have a business. It can't run without you.

Right. So you need to start thinking, how do I replace myself and how do I even replace my team lead? Because what happens if something happens to them? We need a structure, a system in the background that's duplicatable amongst everyone. So everyone's being consistent, everyone's in the same process. And that's, that's the how you're going to scale it, I think. I mean, relying on one person, a key person, that kind of is flaky.

You always just need to have a backup. So that's just about documentation of your systems. We have a pretty robust set of training videos. We actually just reshot those, which is really cool. We shot training videos using 360 cameras that were chest mounted. And so. And then it's went through a very long video editing process where we can point the camera because it recorded everything around you in a big bubble.

We can point the camera at exactly what we need to see what the cleaner's hands are doing. Um, and so we take that very seriously. We keep moving forward with different and better training videos. And all of that is to the benefit of the students that, you know, participate in the masterclass. But it's also, it works for us too, because we use those videos in house. Like those, that's not just for show.

Those are what we train our employees on. And we've done pretty well with that, I think. Yeah, absolutely, guys. So again, if you guys are like, man, I need that. I know how to clean. We know how to clean. But it's like creating that is a process. And sometimes creating those systems, creating those training procedures, those standard operating procedures, SOPs as we call them in business, it's very time consuming.

It's hard to get it out of your head sometimes and turn that into a process and document it and actually something that people could duplicate over and over. So again, if you don't have that yet, you're not sure how to create that. That's why we have the coaching and the masterclass and everything. We show you guys how to model that. You know, you can tweak it, adapt it to fit your business.

But ultimately you have a structure to start with. You're not starting from scratch. So that's what we help a lot of students with on the training systems. So if that's you and you need help with that, definitely book a call with us. We'll, we'll share how to do that here at the end of the podcast. But that's why we hop on these calls. We're going through all these issues you guys are hearing us talk about right now and probably experiencing some of the same issues.

So. And then what else? Lastly on the student, this one had a lot of great things, but they had previous experience with an ineffective, expensive marketing agency. I think they were paying like almost 400 for a lead on Google. It was crazy, you know, thousands of dollars a month. They weren't seeing a return on it. So they needed a more targeted, cost effective marketing strategy. And really important to be educating the customers more on value instead of competing on price.

Right. There's two things in there, I think so. One, the inefficient marketing. This happens to people all the time. You don't know what you don't know. Some company calls you up, says, hey, we've done this for the cleaning companies. It's super slick. We'll get you a hundred leads in a month or whatever it is. Cool. They might get you a hundred leads. They might all be, not your customer, terribly qualified, whatever it is.

So this was a problem for us as well. And so in the end, what we ended up doing was we Partnered with a different company called Tidy your Sales and they've developed a platform for us and the students inside of Profit Cleaners that they do the ads for you, they manage Facebook ads, Google Ads, and I think our acquisition cost for a customer, last time you checked it was somewhere between like 30 and 40, but they were paying like 10x that cost.

And I talked to this person as well and it was very inefficient because they were doing like direct mailing that just was very expensive and has a very low conversion rate. And this is just one of those things that happens over and over and over again. And so in the end we played a hand in having a sort of custom solution designed for cleaning companies. And that has done really, really well.

Yeah, I mean we literally have the same team we've been working with from the very beginning. We did try some other agencies and consultants in the beginning, but we've been working with our main ad team, our marketing team for like the last seven years, basically growing the business. And it's come full circle and we've, we've made it available to you guys now too. The same team that runs our ads, they can run your ads, we can install the proven pipeline in your market.

So that's exactly what we're doing for this student in this case because they were spending boatloads of money on ads. They didn't have an efficient system, they didn't have an effective follow up system. So all of that is what we're helping build out for them running their ads now to bring those costs way down. And yeah, it's really an amazing system because when you do it right, you guys, when you have a consistent flow of high quality leads coming in, not these garbage leads that you're finding on, you know, the aggregator sites like the Home Advisor, the Angie's List, the Thumbtacks, the barks of the world, like all these sites where you can, you can get a lead but you have to fight over that lead with 50 other contractors and then it's a race to the bottom on price and it's a one time clean, that's not a good lead and you're still paying a hundred, 150 bucks for that or whatever it is, they're going to charge you and there's no guarantee, right?

So instead take control of your marketing, build a proper marketing funnel, nurture those leads and then it's a much better experience, it's much more professional and you can educate the lead, build that trust a lot faster so you can tire prices and get them on as a recurring customer. So that's like the beauty of that system. And we can help you guys with that too. But that's essentially what we'd recommend, is build a better marketing system, Build a marketing funnel and have better sales on the back end of that better sales system.

The thing that I want to talk about was educating customers on value proposition versus cheaper alternatives. We have a whole system of rebuttals and responses that is built in there if you want to check it out. But the thing that I think we did that helped more than anything is the problem we ran into is we put in this customer service team, which is great, but they were taking calls and then answering the same sets of questions over and over and over again.

Do you do this? Yes. Do you do this? No. So what Brandon and I did was we actually recorded a quick video. I think it's less than five minutes. And it's just us as the owners of the company saying, hey, we own San Diego Green Clean. Let us tell you a little bit about it. And so it's like the FAQ in video form. It's a team of three.

We try to send the same team every time they. They come out. And we try to get you the same time slot. And that eliminated so much questions for the rep that takes that call. Because you go to the website, you fill out the form at the end, you watch this video, then they call. And so it just reduced the call time that the reps had so that they're able to take more calls, make more sales, move on quicker.

And that was a thing that Brandon and I did one time and then put it on the website. And so you need to work on what your value proposition is. But with, we help you do that inside of the masterclass, but then once you get it dialed in, you just record a video and it answers everybody's question. Absolutely. That's. That was huge doing that and just again building a better marketing funnel, asking better questions on the backend sales process.

Once we do get clients on the phone or potential clients prospects on the phone. Again, the questions you ask just like your, the questions you ask yourself when you're talking to yourself. If you ask disempowering questions, it affects your whole life, Right? And it's the same with your clients. If you ask better questions, fact finding questions. And as we call them in sales, it opens up new doors, it creates value, it creates customization of the clean.

It feels like a more valuable process, a more valuable product at the end. And so this is what we train on as well. Every week with our teams on those scripts, we role play that script. We give you guys that script and the coaching as well. So you can take it and duplicate it and, and run with it. But yeah, that's, that's definitely huge. And competing on, you know, a lot of us, a lot of times we get on these calls and everyone's trying to say the same thing, hey, we compete.

We're the best cleaners, we do the best clean, we'll do, we do it for the best price. That's what everyone else is saying. So instead, be different, differentiate yourself. And then that video Brandon's talking about is exactly how we did that. Facts tell stories sell. We told a story about how did, why did we start San Diego Green Clear? It's a family business. We saw this problem in our community.

Here's what we do, here's what we do differently, right? We told the story of what differentiates us and we told all these different scenarios, the different products we use, the different way we train the different way, all these different things. So now it's a story that people connect with. Whenever you say, hey, I'm gonna tell you guys a story, people lean in, right? It's a human connection that, creating that now.

And that's far different than your competitors who are just talking about feature. We do this the best, we're the best cleaners. Talk about the benefit, talk about why they're, why are they doing this cleaning? Why now? What would make it a five star clean for you? Like all these things that we're going to train our teams on and that will help you guys, again, build value. Instead of just talking about price, we're going to do it for the cheapest price.

That's not going to strategically align you in the market. If you're just competing on price, you actually want to be the highest price in the market eventually because people associate price with value and you're probably the best if you're the highest price, right? So eventually work towards that. And you do that by building better systems, a better experience, better cleaning, all these things. And that's the hard work up front.

But this is why it's worth doing it, guys, so you have a better business on the back end, more sustainable. Awesome. We got a couple more here. I think these are awesome as far as just getting, hopefully you guys are getting value out of these. So another student was having issues with marketing and customer acquisition. Oh, no. This was how we, we just did that one. Growth challenges on the next one Were difficulty getting consistent leads and calls.

Kind of similar stuff, right? Marketing, pricing strategy, needs optimization. The owner was still heavily involved in the day to day operations. Limited time for high level business development. Previous marketing efforts with agencies were unsuccessful. So this is another marketing one. So we covered the marketing. So you now see the, see the most recent one on that one. But I do want to talk about not having time for high level development.

And the owner still very heavily involved in day to day operations. We've told this story before, but when we hired our director of operations, we hired her as kind of like an office person. She helped with scheduling and answering the phone and now she's our director of operations. I pushed back on that, on that hire pretty hard because I was like, how are we going to pay this person?

We're barely paying ourselves, so like where's the money going to come from? And Brandon Shane told me, you know, like we can't afford not to hire them. And so we did. And the idea is if you're making the right hire, they will pay for themselves in the efficiencies that you gain or in the time that you gain to do the work on the business, which will inevitably lead you to more customers, more profit, more whatever it is that you need.

But you have to free up that time. This is, you know, the old adage of you need to be working in the business instead of on the business. But you can't do that until you delegate, which is something we talked about earlier. You have to get those mundane tasks off your plate. And you don't necessarily need to go all the way into hiring a full time person in your office all the time.

You could, it could be as simple as just hiring a virtual assistant. That's in a different country. And we do have one of those as well. And we have a whole episode where we talked about the VAs, but you just need to eliminate some stuff. You gotta start somewhere. You don't have to hire someone to take over your job for 40 hours, but hire someone to check your email if that's what you're struggling with.

Or hire someone to run the credit cards at the end of the day if that's what will free up your time. But you start incrementally and build up to it. Absolutely. And that's very true. A va, a virtual assistant is very, very good for that. We actually, that was actually our very, very first hire. Even before Claudia doing the admin stuff in the office was just like Brandon and I were running around doing marketing and sales and trying to grow the business and put stuff in place.

And we had, we're spread thin, right? So even somebody coming in for an hour a day and just like going through our software and cleaning it up or cleaning up the profiles or job notes or adding in the addresses or billing at the end of the day or like just minute, like repetitive tasks, right? They're important, they got to get done. We were like burned out by the end of the day.

We were like spread thin. So it's like, how are we going to do this? Let's get a little bit of help. You don't need to hire a full time person right away. You could get a virtual assistant. I love working with people in the Philippines. I've worked with them for, you know, 15 plus years in my other businesses. They're great people to work with. So went on upwork, found a great virtual assistant and that freed up our time to focus on the business.

I think you said it backwards, Brandon, but you want a lot of us, we're working in the business right now. You're cleaning, you're doing everything, you're working in the business. You want to get out of that so you can work on the higher level things on the business. You can, you know, get, remember your vision and not be down in the weeds so much, but work on the vision, the bigger stuff.

And yeah, that's exactly why you want to do that. Another great way to do that, we, we did this a few different ways, but we went through a book called Clockwork. Mike Michalowicz think they do it in traction too. But you, you basically document your Whole Week, every 15 minutes, write down what you're doing, right? And you could do this without even going through the book. Just document what you do every day, every 10, 15 minutes, check email, logged into this, took a call.

What are the things you're doing? And then if you start to see patterns and like things like redundancies, right? Things that you're like, oh, that's a repetitive thing. Like those are the things that you start delegating, those are the things you start handing off to your va. Oh, running billing at the end of every day, doing, sending invoices after the estimates. Like these are things that important, they take a little 10 or 15 minutes, but if you add them up over the whole day, it's hours and hours of your time that you could be focused on, follow up, getting the sales, getting the people on the cut, you know, answering the phone, the more important revenue generating tasks that are going to really move you forward Instead of staying down in the weeds and checking emails and other stuff.

Right. So. Or doing the cleaning, for that matter. A lot of us need to get out of the cleaning, so that's a big one as well. And then the last one was having issues with a lack of a consistent training program, no formal hiring process, struggles with efficiency and quality control, and needed better systems for everything. Pricing, scheduling, team management. That's like the fledgling business that has outgrown its current setup.

You need like an upgrade across the board. So training, we kind of covered that one already. You just need to document your systems. We have documented systems if you want to check that out. Hiring process, we actually, we're recording some content with one of the students who ended up being a former recruiter for a big company, and he's retooling our systems and we're putting all that information inside the masterclass course.

So we're working with some experts on helping you do that. What there are systems that we have had in the beginning, but really you just need to be consistent about it. You need to post the right kind of job ads in the right place. You have to try and reverse engineer where your ideal employee is coming from and where do they hang out and try and find them online time, like team efficiency and quality control, that's training.

Going back to team efficiency, some of that schedule efficiency, quality control is just getting out there and doing the inspections. If you are solo, like you're the only person in the office, you're not going to have time to go out in person. Do it by photos. Tell them, like, today we're looking at ceiling fans. Everyone send me a picture of the ceiling fan blades so we can make sure you dusted it correctly.

Nobody's going to send you a picture of a dirty fan. But the idea is, is that every day you are looking at something different. So they know that they need to be good on everything because then you. They never know what you're going to ask for a picture of. So the idea is they'll keep them on their toes and they'll make sure that they're going to do the whole clean correctly.

Yeah, I love that when we, especially in the beginning, we're spread thin, we could run out and do inspections on every team and eventually you don't want to be doing that. You want to empower your teams to do those inspections. But even just those pictures, it brought attention, Right? Like awareness to, like the fans or the floors or whatever part of the house. Maybe there was a pattern of complaints, but as soon as you start bringing people's attention and awareness to that area, they really start paying attention to it more.

Right? And it's just part of that ongoing finesse, the Kaizen principle of, you know, Japanese improvements, small incremental improvements over time. That is exactly what that's, you know, great at doing. And then other, I would say other systems that really helped us with efficiencies, quality control, we're adding an incentive, right? Here's like our bonus system. It's a spreadsheet. It has. It's a public accountability sheet in our office.

It tracks all the things we want to improve. But probably the more important ones are timing on the houses, quality, you know, not getting bad reviews and, you know, all the. There's a bunch of other things we measure too, but when we brought that into place, it dramatically shifted, you know, people's attention to like, hey, if we pay attention to these targets and hit these goals, we'll make more money.

And then on the counter side of that, when we started recognizing the teams and we do the team meetings every week and our trainers and our, you know, staff will help recognize the teams for being great and be like, hey, you guys did great. Here's. Here's a little cash bonus or something else fun. Take them to lunch, whatever it might be, and publicly praise them for living the values, for accomplishing the goals and hitting those goals.

Now everybody else sees that and they want to, they want to win too. So it creates this healthy competition in your business. Those are like kind of nuanced, intangible systems, but they are very powerful, right? You know, recognition, incentives to make more money and then eventually just aligning your teams with the vision where you want to go. People want to be part of that, right? And they're going to step up and step up to the standard that you put in place so that they can, you know, they especially a players that the best teams, you know, and people you're going to attract want to have those goals.

They want to have something to achieve. And then once you set that standard, they'll kind of hold that culture for you and they'll help the quality control. They'll help do those things that maybe in the beginning you feel like you're doing everything, but when you empower your teams, they're going to take control of that. They're going to want to hit the, you know, the quality targets and earn the bonuses and the recognition so you don't have to micromanage them anymore, which is really, really powerful.

So anything else on that One we want to hear. Brandon. I think, I think all of them can be summed up with. You need a system. Like, every single one of these is just a system. And that just starts with documenting what you currently have in place, then figuring out how you can improve it, and then changing the documentation to reflect the improvement and then training everybody on it.

That is how, like, major corporations make changes. Like, I used to work in a very large genetics lab, and anytime there was an SOP change, we all had to review it, talk about it, make sure that we were all trained on the change. That's how you need to do everything with customer service, with training, with a team lead, and it's documented so that if a team lead quits, you can train up another one.

It's all there. It's not easy. Like, it's not without challenge. This is a lot of work. But the good news is we have taken a lot of steps to take that work off of you. And we did that by forming this masterclass. And so you can learn more about that@profitcleaners.com masterclass and you can schedule a call and we can troubleshoot these things with you. You don't have to do it on your own.

Absolutely. Guys, like, nobody ever did anything great on their own. They had a team, they had mentors, they followed in the. In the footsteps of those gone before them. Right. The golden path. Instead of trying to do everything yourself, figuring out, learning from your own mistakes, that's costly. This is why, like, 95% of businesses fail in the first five years of business. Maybe it's lack of capital, but it's also like, things like this where people just don't have humility to be like, what can I learn?

What can I improve? And this is the time of year we're recording this podcast in December. Looking forward into 2025, what can you be like looking back at in your business? This is what we talked about in our coaching call today. But, like, in hindsight, what could you. What are the things you can be improving? What are the things you need to cut loose that aren't working? Double down on what's working.

Streamline these systems so you have an ultimate, crystal clear vision and a treasure map of where you're going to go next and how you're going to make this happen. Instead of like this blurry, dark map of, like, where I don't know what we're doing, what's happening. So this is why we've outlined it. Like Brandon said in the masterclass, it's a 15 minute masterclass. Just go watch that. It's a, it's a free, you know, a little, little mini version of what we do in the coaching and we'll show you guys behind the scenes these different areas in the business that we improve.

Go to profitcleaners.com masterclass check it out if you guys are any of this resonated with you. If you guys want to learn more, book a call with me, the team. Brandon, you're going to learn a lot just by booking one of these calls. We're going to do a lot on the call to strategize with you and work through these issues with you. And if you have more that we can help you with at the end, we'll share what that looks like and you can hop in and work with us and we'll coach you and we'll help you guys take it to the next level.

Right? So that's what it's all about. So anyways, guys, hopefully that was helpful. This is one of the longest podcasts we've ever done, Brandon. But I think people are asking me like, hey, can you guys do longer podcasts? So if you guys want to hear longer podcasts, hear it. We did a longer one, but I'm happy to do a longer podcast. We just a lot of you guys listen to these while you're cleaning with the team.

And so yeah, we don't want to necessarily take up three hours of your day. I don't want to be the Joe Rogan of cleaning. I'm just trying to get you guys a little burst of information and then we can all talk about it later. You know what I mean? Like what you get. If you really want the long form interaction, then those are the coaching calls that we do every week.

Those are an hour long every Thursday. And you, it's like a Q and A session. Or we'll teach you something every week if there are no questions. It just depends on what's going on. So that's what I would suggest. And the way you get those is what we've already talked about. You starts by watching that 15 minute masterclass and then you book a call. Yeah, exactly, guys. So the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

And putting these systems in place, it's not easy, but take the first step, take massive action. You know, put yourself in a place where you can learn. Be a sponge. The best entrepreneurs are sponges. They absorb everything. They take the knowledge and then they take massive action. And that's what's going to Change your life, guys. It's not just learning. You got to actually take massive action, go do something with it, so.

But it's easier to do that when you're surrounded by people doing it. When you're surrounded by people winning, you're just elevated. Naturally, you're like, oh, my gosh, everyone else is doing it. Like, you know, and he's how humans are. They're like the replicators, right? We replicate what we see around us. So let's just do it together, right? It's a long journey. It's hard work. It's the hardest thing you'll ever do is being an entrepreneur.

So surround yourself with people doing it, especially people in the same niche industry, like, couldn't be a better place, guys. So, yeah, we'll see you guys on those. On one of those calls. Book a call with us. Watch the masterclass first. You'll learn a ton. It'll be great. Profitcleaners.com masterclass and hopefully you guys got value out of this. We'll see you guys on the next show. Keep it clean.

Yeah, Keep it clean, guys. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to profitcleaners.com and remember, keep it clean.